Lytro: Why it might succeed in spite of its lackluster camera

There has been a lot of hype over the now shipping Lytro “light field” camera, with the resulting let down from some who are now getting actual production units in their hand. Its odd, if iconic, shape, the lack of video, and 1MP final image resolution make the camera a question mark for many potential buyers. Capturing effective images with the radical new re-focusing capability also requires some re-learning on the part of the photographer, which along with the camera’s imaging limitations could create the potential for the blogosphere equivalent of buyer’s remorse over initial predictions its camera would come to rule the world.

Further complicating the life of initial Lytro owners is the requirement for a cabled-connection to a Mac to upload photos, and then a connection to Lytro’s website to process them. Windows software is planned, but for now there are likely to be a lot of disappointed Windows users as they unwrap their Lytro pre-order cameras later this week. The camera has an unused wifi chip inside, so it is likely future versions will feature improved workflow flexibility.

However, writing off Lytro based on its initial efforts misses the forest for the trees — or in this case the camera. While Ren Ng, the brilliant and charismatic founder and CEO of Lytro, gushes as much or more than anyone else about its first product, his vision for the company goes far beyond creating a new consumer gadget launched into a crowded marketplace. It even goes beyond the dreamy “reinvention of photography” taglines found in some of the most fanboyish of articles on Lytro.

Reinventing the lens

In the process of trying to reinvent the camera, Ng has found a way to potentially reinvent the economics of creating cameras and lenses — a strategy that in the long run is a lot more likely to make Lytro money than selling their own cameras. What he noticed is that lenses have been stuck in the past for years, with advances in optical design barely keeping pace with the needs of increased resolution. As he points out every chance he gets, a pro quality lens like a 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom costs more than it did a decade ago (over $2,000 currently for the Nikon and Canon models) and is every bit as large as it has ever been.

Light field photography can change that. In addition to the obvious weight, cost, and space savings of no longer needing focusing optics in the lens, light field cameras can perform corrections for aberrations in their image reconstruction software This will allow even high-end models to potentially have much less expensive lenses. Lytro’s own lens is a perfect illustration. A speedy and light-grabbing f/2 across its entire 8x zoom range, it is only a couple inches long and its weight can be measured in ounces.

Unleashing the sensor industry

Ng isn’t stopping at lenses. He claims that sensor vendors are close to producing gigapixel models, but don’t know who to sell them to. With conventional camera and lens design, diffraction rears its ugly head long before reaching that resolution. Lytro believes that its designs are immune to diffraction limits and mostly immune to the noise typically associated with high resolution — because the pixel values are added together in processing. Thus light field cameras may provide a natural market for ultra-high-resolution sensors, and ultimately for Lytro as an enabler for them. The resulting partnerships could produce 100MP resolution light field images, as compared to the 1MP that the current Lytro camera produces. Lytro’s Executive Chairman, Charles Chi, who has the experience and contacts to pull off the kind of partnerships this would require, stressed this potential in a recent interview with PC World, echoing Ng’s comments about the superiority of light field technology in utilizing high-resolution sensors.

Video could also be turned from a weakness of Lytro — their first camera has no video capability — to a strength. The option of filming and focusing later would be incredibly freeing for both videographers and especially cinematographers. Ng already has the tag line for this feature — “unscripted for life.” Of course for video to become a strength, the current bottleneck of the time required to post-process each image will have to be shattered. For high-end projects with large budgets the computers needed might not be a problem, but at the consumer level users want instant access to their latest video clips.

Leaping ahead in a crowded field

Lytro is not alone in championing the virtues of computational photography — basically any system where programming is used to reconstruct the final image — for the mass market. Stealth startup Pelican Imaging, for example, is relying on combining images from an array of small, cheap lenses to create high-quality images previously only possible from one large and expensive lens. It’s aiming to revolutionize the smartphone camera with this approach.

Even Adobe has gotten in on the act, with Adobe scientist Todor Georgiev spearheading research into what he calls integral view photography, which he defines as the construction of an image in software after the capture. For those unable or unwilling to wade through Ng’s 200-page Stanford dissertation, the technical report Georgeiv wrote for Adobe on his research is a great introduction to the potential of computational photography. While it seems unlikely Adobe will actually build a camera, count on it to begin to add more elements of computational photography into Photoshop over time. This will make life easier for the creators of light field capture devices like Lytro and Pelican.

By launching a direct-to-consumer camera Lytro has leapt ahead of all its potential competitors for the race to become king of light field and computational photography, but that strategy can backfire if limitations of Lytro’s first camera tarnish its brand before Ng and co can move on to some of the amazing future possibilities for their technology. Early reviews like the one from Popular Science that cite excessive noise and a tendency to blur images won’t help Lytro’s cause as it buys time to perfect its technology and its camera. Every startup feels the pressure to get its first product out the door, but only time will tell whether Lytro’s gamble of producing its own camera will pay off over the long run.

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Unfortunately I think the FocusTwist app for $2 could be a killer for Lytro….It doesn’t take a Stanford EE degree to know you could have accomplished a faux-lytro effect with standard smartphone cameras today. Funny an app that a high-schooler could develop will put Pelican/Lytro and all their ridiculously smart silicon valley investors to shame.

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